A LOT HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK, like it does in its writer’s life. A Life Less Ordi-nary is not so much about the mean-ing of life or the angst of living. It is about liv-ing. It is the journey of a woman who leaves her familiar though cruel surroundings not for any adventure but in search of an ordinary life. But what Baby Halder ended up with is something quite extraordinary.

When Halder became a domestic worker in the Gurgaon home of Prabodh Kumar, a former professor and grandson of Premc-hand, she was happy to find work in a house that treated her so well. As she dusted his book-lined shelves, she frequently lingered over the Bangla titles. Can you read at all, one day Kumar asked her. “I won’t lie,” Halder replied, “but what I know is like knowing nothing.” Halder had studied “till about sixth or seventh” but could name among her favourite writers Tagore, Kazi Nasrul Islam, Sharatchandra, Satyendra Nath Dutt, Suku-mar Rai. Kumar gave her a diary, a pen and an instruction: Write.

The result was Aalo-Aandhari—translated now into English as A Life Less Ordinary. The storyline is fairly simple. Baby Halder spent the first four years “somewhere” in Jammu and Kashmir before her father left them in Murshidabad. Her mother put up with his long absences before walking out one day with her youngest son. The only thing Halder’s mother left her to remember her by was a ten paise coin she pressed into her palm the day she left.

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